In Brief
The old asylum called Old Main looms over Whitesboro Street in Utica, New York, its six columns 48 feet tall. People report screaming from the basement and faces at the upper windows of a building where agitated patients were once locked in boxes barely deeper than a coffin.
The Full Story
Old Main, the abandoned asylum on Whitesboro Street in Utica, New York, is a building people drive past and watch. Its six Greek Revival columns stand 48 feet tall, fronting a façade over 550 feet long. The screaming, visitors say, comes from the basement. Footsteps cross empty corridors. Faces appear at the sealed upper windows, looking out. Urban explorers who get inside report cold spots that come and go, voices and whispers with no source, and phones that drain to nothing in minutes.
It opened on January 16, 1843, as the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, the first state-run facility for the mentally ill in New York and one of the first in the country. The ideals behind it were genuinely progressive. Its first director, Dr. Amariah Brigham, believed mental illness came from a bad environment, not moral failure, and in 1844 he founded the first English-language journal written only about mental illness. Patients ran their own literary magazine, The Opal, ten volumes of articles and poems printed on the asylum's own press.
You could be committed here for "sadness due to grief," a bump on the head, or "religious excitement."
And once you were inside, an agitated patient could be locked in a Utica Crib. It was a wooden box, six feet long and about 18 inches deep, with a hinged lid that latched from the outside. Patients were left in it for days. Some died there, of seizures or panic or simple neglect, because an attendant assumed a struggling patient was throwing a tantrum rather than suffocating. The cribs were finally removed from the hospital on January 18, 1887. Lobotomies and electroshock came later.
Real people passed through. The abolitionist Gerrit Smith was committed after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. "That affair excited and shocked me," he wrote later, "and a few weeks after I was taken to a lunatic asylum." Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop spent 26 months here against her will, from 1880 to 1882, then wrote an exposé called "A Secret Institution" and founded a league to free people locked away while sane.
The building has nearly burned once already. In July 1852 a fire started in the ventilation system, spread to the attic, and gutted the center of the place; a firefighter and a doctor died, and a former patient later confessed to setting it.
The hospital closed by the late 1970s. In 2004 a portion of Old Main was converted to hold records for the state's mental health office. The building outlasted everyone it held, and now it keeps the paperwork.
